Try this before the film (The Godfather - Mario Puzo)

Member Name: tommy7

Product:	The Godfather - Mario Puzo
Date:	12/04/01 (408 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great Story

Disadvantages: Its ends!

Mario Puzo’s book is often overlooked due to the incredible success of the film adaptations. In the local Waterstones store there was money off all film related paperbacks so I managed to pick up this book for £4.99.

It has been a number of years since I saw any of the Godfather movies and my memories of the story were sketchy at best, I think that this added to my enjoyment of the book as I didn’t know where the story was going a lot of the time.

The book is one of the best I have ever read and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is even slightly interested in mafia/gangster stories.

There are nine books within the book. Each book concentrates on different parts of the bigger picture. Quite often the story jumps from the present to anything up to 50 years in the past. The beauty of it is that the story is not overly complicated. The time frames merge very easily and any time the story jumps back it fills in details of a character’s past or how he/she became involved with the Corleones. This was a real strength of the book in my opinion. The opening book starts at the wedding of Don Corleone’s only daughter Connie. The Don has a massive amount of friends eager to repay his favours and you get the impression that he is a man of immense power and wealth. However, some of the later books go a long way to explaining how this empire was built and why The Don is treated with the utmost respect. In this sense it is a complete story.

I read the book over a period of about 10 days, the amazing thing was that every time I left the book I was dying to know what was going to happen next. I never leave a book in this situation. I normally wait for the next lull in the story but there were almost no lulls in the story with even the lesser characters being incredibly well developed.

The writing style is excellent and very easy to read. Mario Puzo often slips in the odd Italian word but usually
explains the meaning and a lot of the words are words we are familiar with anyway.

It is a pity that this book does not seem to be held up with the films as it is an excellent book. However, I suppose that it could be argued that without the film I and I suspect a lot of others would never have read the book.

I intend to go and watch the trilogy as I think the films take the story from the book and take it forward. I am interested to see how the story continues to evolve and given the reputation of the films I am sure I will not be disappointed.

It is a pity that this was Mario Puzo’s first novel as all others were compared along side it and as a result were treated less favourably. However, I intend to try and read some of his other work as I enjoyed the way he wrote.

Summary: